There’s a metaphor of 49ers quarterback Alex Smith looking over the shoulder of starter Colin Kaepernick in here somewhere.

It’s something of a truism among people who use truisms on topics like these that the divisional round of the NFL playoffs is the season’s best weekend of football. The reasoning behind this, which is sound enough, is a matter of quality times quantity: This round offers four games all with high stakes and quality teams. This may well be the case, and after a mostly excruciating wild-card round it won’t be all that difficult for this to be the postseason’s best weekend of football. Whether it’s this season’s best weekend of football remains to be seen, of course. But it does seem like it should be worth at least a little bit of couch time. After last week, that’s something.

The weekend’s marquee game, both in terms of relative franchise prestige and objective Super Bowl-readiness, is Saturday’s match-up between the Packers and 49ers, in San Francisco. The history between the teams—or even Aaron Rodgers’s enduring offense at his hometown 49ers passing him up in the NFL draft nearly eight years ago—matters less than each team’s recent history. As might be expected, given that this is the 19th week of the NFL season, both teams are injured, tired and compromised. They’re also, if you’ll grant your Fixer license to state the obvious, really good. This game is why this weekend is so beloved.

This is not to say that the struggling Texans will breeze into Foxboro and beat the Patriots, or that the Falcons will overcome some statistical disadvantages against the Seahawks. It’s not saying anything much more than that this is the divisional round of the NFL playoffs, and thus that nothing should be ruled out.

* * *

When Junior Seau committed suicide last May, it was the cause for some unusually intense, if typically brief, worry about the epidemic of traumatic brain injury in football. Seau was young, and not long removed from his last NFL play, but had suffered a number of all-too-familiar problems before ending his life with a shotgun blast to the chest. On Thursday, word came back that Seau’s brain, which his family donated to the National Institutes of Health, showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative condition that affects brains subject to repeated mild trauma such as concussions, and which has been identified in several other NFL suicides.

The most startling thing about the news, as USA Today’s Jarrett Bell writes, is how unsurprising it was. Football’s problem with brain trauma is one that everyone involved with the game—including the NFL, which faces massive lawsuits from former players and noted recent efforts to make the game safer in its statement responding to Seau’s posthumous diagnosis—understands to be a problem. The greater and more worrying problem, though, is how little we understand about this problem. As Yahoo’s Eric Adelson points out, there’s no concrete certainty on any of this, or even whether Seau’s CTE explained his post-career sufferings and eventual tragic choice.

And just as football’s problem is bigger than Seau, the confusion encompasses more than just his death and its cause. “We know more about the consequences of concussions than ever, and still don’t really know anything,” SB Nation’s Andrew Sharp writes. “We know CTE is bad and prevalent among retired NFL players, and sure there’s someone like Seau, but he’s an extreme example. The question is how many players don’t kill themselves after they leave football, and instead just live 20 or 30 years quietly soaking in their own misery. We have no idea.”

* * *

Robert Lipsyte, the longtime New York Times sports columnist, is an icon in his field and, naturally, an icon to his son Sam, a successful novelist. The two are close, not just genetically and personally, but in terms of the spiky wryness of their styles. Which probably has something to do with why—as Lipsyte reveals in an essay from the book ”Jewish Jocks,” which was reprinted at Deadspin—growing up as the son of a sportswriter wasn’t necessarily simple.

“I wanted to write, I wanted to make my father proud, I wanted to kill my father, and I wanted him to be proud of me for killing him,” Lipsyte the younger writes. “Good thing those feelings fade. It’s just so exhausting. Somebody once told me there is an Egyptian saying that goes, ‘When your son grows up, make him your brother.’ Robert Lipsyte and I are father and son, but we are brothers as well…[And] the old crud is still finding and telling the stories as well as he ever did. I’ll take witnessing that over box seats at the World Series or the Super Bowl.”

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